I decided to put my Peace Corps sticker in my gun case

When I was doing Peace Corps in Micronesia one day they gave me a little Peace Corps sticker. I actually kept that sticker for months and months now waiting for the perfect idea to come to me of where I put it. I finally decided to put it in my Ruger handgun case.

It's like a Yin & Yang thing. Or a moral conflict illustrated in some sort of cosmic paradox.

Pogue Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armor?
Private Joker: A peace symbol, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Where'd you get it?
Private Joker: I don't remember, sir.
Pogue Colonel: What is that you've got written on your helmet?
Private Joker: "Born to Kill", sir.
Pogue Colonel: You write "Born to Kill" on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?
Private Joker: No, sir.
Pogue Colonel: You'd better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant **** on you.
Private Joker: Yes, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Now answer my question or you'll be standing tall before the man.
Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
Pogue Colonel: The what?
Private Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Whose side are you on, son?
Private Joker: Our side, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Don't you love your country?
Private Joker: Yes, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Then how about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?
Private Joker: Yes, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Son, all I've ever asked of my marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every **** there is an American trying to get out. It's a hardball world, son. We've gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
Private Joker: Aye-aye, sir.

I think some of the women I served with kept bush knives (short machetes) in their bedrooms for defense.

Just because the PC has a quasi-diplomatic mission does not mean we're all pacifists. Or, as Larry Hartsell is quoted "Don't mistake kindness for weakness".

I was in the South Pacific - Polynesia - in the late 90s. Sometimes I'm sorry I came back.

Well, the women really had it rough in a sense, because of the local customs regarding sexual relations, i.e. "nightcrawling". Traditionally young men would crawl through the jungle to a family house, find his girlfriend, and they'd go off and have sex; there's lots of funny stories about the young men accidentally waking up the grandma instead, or him waking up the male family members who would then chase him through the jungle with machetes.

But if we're talking about an American woman having a horny guy sneak to your room at night and try to break in can be really traumatizing. One of my fellow volunteers was a small young lady from Chappaqua and she really got traumatized when someone tried to get through her window.

One thing I feel like I learned about American women from my experience is the extent to which situations like that can be completely unnerving and frightening in the long term, and also how physically helpless lots of women go around feeling.

What I mean is if you asked me, or lots of people who post on bullshido.net, "what could you do to defend yourself if an unarmed man walked up to you in the street and began acting in a physically aggressive manner towards you," you'd get a lot of different responses which would all more or less make sense and probably the responses would range from social responses to combative ones. But when I overheard some women (my colleagues) talking about hypothetical situations like that I noticed that the only things they discussed were half-baked social responses, i.e. "I'd say such and such and this would make the guy possibly act in a different way", and never anything combative or physical. I think that physical combat is so far removed from these peoples' lives that it doesn't even occur to them as a viable option, and the mentality that they would always be the physically helpess victim in any sort of altercation seems to be ingrained as a kind of cognitive default.

So I think that I actually learned something important about US society by seeing how some women from the US reacted under stress in a different social setting.